Kadosaki

Kadosaki is a lawyer involved in the abolition movement who takes on Makoto Hara after an exposé describes his troubled life as the son of an infamous criminal. She argues that childhood trauma and psychiatric illness should matter in judging his repeated shoplifting, introduces him to a psychiatrist after his release, and continues to check on him. When Kido later proposes that her client may have been living under a borrowed name, Kadosaki’s response brings the novel’s intricate identity puzzle into contact with an immediate ethical question: what does it mean to help someone when even the name attached to his life may be false?

Legal Work and Advocacy

Kadosaki discovers the exposé soon after its publication and is dismayed by its treatment of Hara, the child of a notorious convict. She accepts him as a client when he receives a second prison sentence. In court, she emphasizes his early childhood trauma and history of psychiatric treatment, arguing that his habitual shoplifting results from mental illness. The court does not take that history into account in sentencing.

Her concern continues beyond the courtroom. Fearing that Hara’s kleptomania could lead him to offend again, Kadosaki arranges for him to see a psychiatrist after his release. She sometimes checks up on him, sustaining a practical relationship of care that is not limited to the legal case. The attention she gives his childhood and mental health stands against the exposé’s speculation that criminal tendencies might be inherited from his father, Kenkichi Kobayashi.

Kido’s Inquiry and the Identity Hypothesis

Kido cannot find photographs of Makoto Hara online, so he contacts Kadosaki through Sugino and asks what Hara looks like. She tells him that he does not resemble his father. During their conversation, Kido also learns that Hara served his sentence at Yokohama Prison, where Omiura had been incarcerated too. That connection makes a suspicion Kido has been entertaining seem newly plausible: the man known as X might be the real Makoto Hara, while Kadosaki’s client might have exchanged family registers with him through Omiura.

Kido puts the possibility to Kadosaki over the phone. She is initially speechless, then challenges the fairness of the supposed exchange. Even if someone loathes his past, she says, that cannot justify tricking a mentally handicapped drifter into exchanging registers. Her objection shifts the question from whether the identity theory fits the clues to whether the exchange could have been informed or fair.

Kido questions whether the client was actually deceived, reasoning that he knows Makoto Hara is Kenkichi Kobayashi’s son. Kadosaki replies that he will say yes to anything and that it is difficult to know whether he truly understands. For her, that uncertainty makes the possibility of exploitation more serious, not less: she regards taking advantage of someone who may not comprehend the transaction as plainly wrong.

The Meeting with Tashiro

Kido and Kadosaki eventually meet the man whose identity is in question. Over cake, Kido asks about his life. The man says he moved from job to job after high school, enduring insults, and had been homeless for ten years. The money he received for the family-register exchange, after Omiura took his share, barely covered a month’s food. He does not know how much Makoto Hara paid.

Asked whether he feared that being identified as Kobayashi’s son would make his life harder, the man says he did, but that he does not tell people and they do not connect Hara to Kobayashi because the family names differ. The meeting lasts about an hour and a half. Its details give Kadosaki a life history that the legal file and the name Hara had obscured: prolonged homelessness, mistreatment, and a payment too small to provide lasting security.

Recognition, Disillusionment, and Significance

After the meeting, alone with Kido, Kadosaki struggles to reconcile the person she has supported with the possibility that he is not Hara but Tashiro. She wonders what her efforts meant if the name was wrong, recalling that he never wanted to discuss his childhood. She had taken that silence as understandable and felt it was not right to press him. Her response is not simply embarrassment at having misidentified a client; it is grief and uncertainty about the relationship of trust through which she had tried to help him.

Kadosaki’s actions reveal the limits as well as the value of legal advocacy. She can contest a sentence, draw attention to trauma and psychiatric treatment, and help secure care after release, yet the official identity on which her work rests may itself be the product of an exchange. The revelation does not erase the support she gave; it changes what that support can be said to have meant. Her concern for a vulnerable person persists even as the story forces her to question whether he understood the bargain that shaped his recorded identity.